Changes and Improvements in MariaDB 11.4

MariaDB 11.4 is a current long-term development series. See Plans for MariaDB 11.4.

Upgrading

• See Upgrading Between Major MariaDB Versions and Upgrading from MariaDB 10.11 to MariaDB 11.4.

New Features

SSL/TLS

• SSL is now enabled in the server by default. No configuration necessary, if no server certificate was provided a self-signed certificate will be automatically generated by the server. See Mission Impossible: Zero-Configuration SSL for details (MDEV-31856).
• Clients now can validate self-signed server certificates if the mysql_native_password or ed25519 authentication is used and account password is not empty (MDEV-31855).
• Clients now require SSL and have --ssl-verify-server-cert enabled by default (MDEV-31857).
• Replication clients do that too, MASTER_SSL_VERIFY_SERVER_CERT is enabled by default.
• Use --disable-ssl or --disable-ssl-verify-server-cert to revert to the old behavior.
• Clients can use new command line options --tls-fp and --tls-fplist to verify the server certificate by its fingerprint

Partitioning

• ALTER TABLE … EXCHANGE PARTITION and ALTER TABLE … CONVERT TABLE … TO now support the WITH VALIDATION and WITHOUT VALIDATION clauses. If neither is specified, the default behavior is WITH VALIDATION (MDEV-22164)

Sys Schema

• New view sys.privileges_by_table_by_level shows granted privileges broken down by table on which they allow access and level on which they were granted. For example, if a user x has SELECT privilege granted ON db.*, this view will list all tables in the db schema with the user x having SELECT privilege on them. This is different from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_PRIVILEGES, which only lists privileges granted on the table level (MDEV-24486)

Optimizer

• Not only ascending, but also descending indexes can now be used to optimize MIN() and MAX() (MDEV-27576)

Spider

• The preferred way to specify Spider parameters is to use the dedicated Spider table options (implemented in MariaDB 11.3). Abusing the table COMMENT clause is now deprecated (MDEV-28861)

Miscellaneous

• CONV() function now supports conversion up to base 62 (MDEV-30879)
• Added support for packages (CREATE PACKAGE) outside of ORACLE sql_mode (MDEV-32101)

Replication

• Binary log writing speed was improved by moving checksum calculations out of the global binlog mutex (MDEV-31273). This is a contribution by Kristian Nielsen
• New system variable max_binlog_total_size enables binary log purging when the total size of all binary logs exceeds the specified threshold. The implementation is based on the patch from Percona (MDEV-31404)
• New system variable slave_connections_needed_for_purge disables binary log purging until the number of connected slaves reaches the specified threshold (MDEV-31404).
• FULL_NODUP is a new value for the binlog_row_image system variable. It essentially works like FULL, that is all columns are included in the event, but it takes less space, because the after image omits columns that were not changed by the UPDATE statement, and have same values as in the before image. This is a contribution from Alibaba (MDEV-32589)
• mariadb-binlog --flashback support for the FULL_NODUP mode. This is a contribution from Alibaba (MDEV-32894).
• MariaDB can optionally maintain a special index of GTIDs and their location in the binary log. If enabled (the default), it allows finding very quickly where a new connecting replica should start replicating from. Without an index, this required scanning the binlog. This is a contribution by Kristian Nielsen (MDEV-4991).

Backup and Restore

• New mariadb-dump option, -j, --parallel=# for increased parallelism, specifies the number of dump table jobs executed in parallel (only for use with the --tab option). Also added to mariadb-import, with --use-threads as a synonym. (MDEV-32216)

Application-Time Periods

• Add views for periods in information_schema (MDEV-22597), in particular
• New view INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PERIODS
• New view INFORMATION_SCHEMA.KEY_PERIOD_USAGE
• New columns IS_SYSTEM_TIME_PERIOD_START and IS_SYSTEM_TIME_PERIOD_END in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS view

Variables

• For a list of all new variables, see System Variables Added in MariaDB 11.4.

List of All MariaDB 11.4 Releases